Growing up around family members with artistic careers, Nicole White became interested in art early in life. Yet despite pursuing an undergraduate degree in photography and finding satisfying work in the art world, she felt she could only go so far.
“I interacted with a lot of curators, people who specialized in the history of photography and who had this understanding that I didn’t have,” White says. “The only way to move forward was to get my master’s in art history.”
Now nearing completion of her master’s thesis in art history at UConn’s School of Fine Arts, White says she values the range of disciplines she was encouraged to explore during her two years at UConn.
“The program is structured in a way that’s very flexible,” says White, a landscape photographer. “I had the chance to tailor it to my specific interests, tak[ing] courses outside of the department to help inform my thesis.”
For White, one of those classes – a history course about land and society in America – helped spark the basis of her graduate research. “That got [me] thinking about people in America specifically, and how their relationship to land has changed over the past 200 years,” she says. “I’m trying to relate those changes, then, to how landscape is depicted in artwork.”
Besides sharpening her research skills, White says her work at UConn has been instructive in other ways. “Not only has it really informed my understanding of the history of photography, but it’s informed my personal work, too,” she says. “I’m hoping that all of this will then translate into making art as well.”
In her own photographic work, White often depicts the destruction caused by environmental disasters, shooting such sites as New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward following Hurricane Katrina and the regions of Tennessee deluged in 2008 by a massive spillage of coal ash.
“I’m very interested in how moving large portions of land and removing and stripping things … permanently, indelibly, changes what the land looks like,” she says.
Headed next to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a master of fine arts in photography this fall, White anticipates ultimately teaching or working in a museum, while continuing to write about photography and undertake her own photographic projects.
“I think it’s very important, if you’re making artwork, to be informed about what it is you’re doing,” she says. “I just want to keep taking stuff in – the more the better.”